The Trenton Times published the following article on July 10, 2013. To read the full article, click here.

Trenton officials prepare for revaluation of 28,000 city properties

By Nicole Mulvaney/The Times of Trenton 
on July 10, 2013 at 7:00 AM, updated July 10, 2013 at 7:06 AM

TRENTON — The long-awaited process of reevaluating homes and other properties in the city will begin in about 18 months and will change many residents’ property taxes, resulting in higher bills for some and lower ones for others, officials said yesterday.

The Mercer County Board of Taxation in 2011 ordered the city to conduct the revaluation, saying the assessments that tax bills are based on have grown inaccurate in the more than two decades since the last survey of property values. Accurate assessment helps ensure the local tax burden is distributed fairly, officials said.

“We recognize that Trenton’s last revaluation was in 1992, and that is unacceptable,” business administrator Sam Hutchinson told the city council at a meeting yesterday.

The process aims to make sure that the city’s assessments of property values correspond to actual market values, which shift over time due to inflation, rising or falling demand for homes in different neighborhoods and other factors. About 30 different neighborhoods and 28,000 different properties will be assessed by a private revaluation firm after bids are submitted and approved, tax assessor Patricia Hice said.

The firm will investigate and calculate new assessments for each specific property by going door-to-door, Hice said. The company will be required to make at least three attempts to assess each property.

“These people will have to see each property. Otherwise we will have to estimate the information,” she said.

The process typically takes two years and will cost Trenton $3 million, budget officer Elana Chan said.

“We need to begin discussing where the money is going to come from, because this will make a substantial financial impact,” Hutchinson said.

A revaluation does not on its own affect the total amount of taxes collected by a municipality, though it can change the share paid by individual property owners. In some cases, when a revaluation results in a municipality’s total property value substantially increasing or falling, municipalities must adjust the tax rate to ensure that total tax collections remain the same.

Taxpayers may not feel the effects of the revaluation until 2016, depending on how quickly a revaluation contract is established and the assessments are made, Hice said.

Three other Mercer towns that have also not had revaluations in recent years have also begun the process. Their most recent revaluations were in 1993 in Ewing, 1994 in Lawrence and 1999 in Hamilton.

Councilwoman Phyllis Holly-Ward said she was concerned about the public’s awareness that the assessing process will be taking place in the community.

“We need to get the message out that this is going to be happening,” she said. “People need to know who to expect at their front doors.”

Revaluations have in the past drawn bitter protests when they led to spikes in home assessments and tax bills, most recently for less affluent Princeton homeowners who saw their taxes jump in 2010 even as Princeton University and some owners of larger homes saw their assessments drop.

In 2010, Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried sued the county Board of Taxation for ordering the township to reevaluate in 2005 at the height of the real estate market, saying the market crash that soon followed resulted in a surge in tax appeals that cost the township $1.7 million. Fried dropped the suit after the tax board announced the revaluations for the four towns.

Contact Nicole Mulvaney at nmulvaney@njtimes.com.